Especially in the modern era where the Internet allows one to make every stupid pointless element of life public--and even commentable--it's hard to believe that no one cares. They do not, however. This is true.
(And...cue poetry and boo-hoo story swapping on Myspace and Livejournal.)
I've started looking for jobs in a very perfunctory not-deleting-emails sort of way, and the first thing the career advisor told me to do was remove all the high school stuff from my résumé. Four years of life just gone like that--return to the tabula rasa (well not really; I've done plenty of stuff in college, or maybe at least enough to forget about some of the stuff I've done). Four years that don't matter even though everyone in this country tells you that high school is where all sorts of firsts happen--kiss, drink, driving, job, girl/boyfriend, etc.
The funny thing is that I can remember entering high school and being told the same thing--all those years of elementary and middle school? Those were baby years. This is the real deal, blah blah blah.
And yes, college actually is a real transition--there's enough natural selection going on here to force everyone to take their classes seriously. Even the people who allegedly coast through things--I've seen all of them working hard at one point or another.
Nevertheless, that isn't the point. The point is that 16 years of my life are nothing more than an irrelevant book holding up a piano leg, and for that I am lucky. (Most people, it's 18.)
The world doesn't care about who you were. The world only needs to know who you are now and how useful you will be.
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